I had the idea Robert Normandeau, famed Montréal electroacoustic composer, was a regular name in these pages, but in fact we haven’t noted a release from him since 2001’s Claire de terre, his ambitious inter-galactic composition that drunk in the beauties of images of the earth seen from outer space. Before that there was the 1999 release Figures, with its memorable opening track Le renard et la rose composed of multiple layers of people laughing (to quite nightmarish effect) and the 19-minute Venture, which used samples from Normandeau’s prog-rock LP collection. Normandeau is a significant composer and establishment figure of many years standing, for instance he helped found the Canadian Electroacoustic Community in 1987.

His Dômes (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 14128) is a compilation / survey of five recent-ish works, not really connected with each other. La part des anges offers an ethereal and complex digital drone. It’s supposed to illustrate the way that alcohol evaporates through the walls of a barrel, or may be partially inspired by that fermentation process. In like manner, the composer tries to extract the essence of goodness from the choral material he is sampling and assembling here. Delicate, serene, unearthly in places; the listener may sip this aural brandy with some pleasure.

His Kuppel is more earth-bound. Mundane, even. On one level, it’s an assemblage of field recordings, not unlike the sort of thing we hear in abundance from the German label Dekorder. Normandeau spent two months in Karlsruhe and recorded the trams, the church bell chiming on the Markplatz, and a squeaky door near the studio where he was working. There isn’t much radical sound-transformation going here on that I can detect, but the finished work was intended to be broadcast through the PA system of the art gallery ZKM_Kubus in Karlsruhe, thus cementing its status as a site-specific installation.

Pluies noires from 2008 (reworked in 2014) has a darker theme. Normandeau composed incidental stage music for Sarah Kane’s play Blasted, which uses rain in the story to create dramatic pauses. Since the play contains references to the Bosnian conflict, Normandeau sees fit to ponder on “the darkness of the human soul”. Movie fans may recall the memorable lines in Taxi Driver “Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets,” although from the dreary music on offer here it’s clear Normandeau intends something less direct and more metaphysical with these grim drones, which might be composed from brass instrument samples. A good effort to capture internal mental turmoil in sound.

Le renard et la rose noted above is reprised to some degree on 2012’s Baobabs; it’s described here as an “adaptation” of that original acousmatic piece from 1995. Four lively voices, clattering percussion and tape effects combine in sprightly fashion to realise the most engaging cut on this collection. Normandeau’s use of the voice appears, again, to be strictly abstract and non-verbal, but he’s interested in a deeper level of vocal communication where “human language sound corresponds directly to the object”. Layered inside these 13 and one-half minutes is a further composition inspired by Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, which was commissioned by Radio Canada. This is enjoyable, if in places a rather old-school piece of composition; it could easily have been realised in the late 1960s by Berio or Ligeti.

… I’ve been catching up with some of Empreintes DIGITALes’s output from late 2014 and want to flag up a couple of highly impressive discs. The renowned Canadian electroacoustic composer Robert Normandeau‘s latest offering is Dômes, featuring five pieces either revised or completed in the last three years. As in all his work, the interaction between familiar sound sources and their more abstract treatment is fascinating. Kuppel uses the bells of a church in Karlsruhe as an omnipresent pulse, pitch centre and point of perspective. Normandeau layers the noises of trams and a squealing door over these bells such that a strange kind of veracity appears, simultaneously life-like yet obviously artificial. Baobabs is the most obtuse piece on the disc, a 15-minute surreal stream of consciousness for four voices, six percussion and tape that persistently keeps one at a distance. Thankfully, it’s the exception to the rule. Hamlet-Machine without Actors and Pluies noires engage with theatrical drama; the latter piece, with the Bosnian conflict in mind, is a disconcerting aerated dronescape peppered with heavy dull impacts that seem to squash and leave dazed every other sound. They become reduced to extended whispers and gargles, occasionally marshalling themselves sufficiently to form potent but short-lived eruptions; a sense of struggle is palpable. The former piece also employs a drone at its centre, a beautiful, radiant core beneath shifting metallic/industrial strata. A work about “the oppression of man by society”, perhaps Normandeau locates humanity within this luminous core, in which case its persistence makes this a positive statement. La part des anges is the album’s highlight, though, an opulent, shining piece of pure sonic ecstasy, full of rich clouds of complex tonalities and the evocation of a myriad celestial voices.

La part des anges is the album’s highlight, though, an opulent, shining piece of pure sonic ecstasy, full of rich clouds of complex tonalities and the evocation of a myriad celestial voices.

Two years after the excellent Palimpsestes, empreintes DIGITALes offers another interesting collection of outputs for domes of directional loudspeakers, which can render the illusion of multidimensional sounds by means of stereophonic systems, by Prof Normandeau to more demanding followers of electroacoustic music. It includes five long impressive pieces that can reasonably be considered monumental as the composer acts as a sort of architect who erects sonic cathedrals: the opening La part des anges (2011, 12) sounds like a glimpse and an exploration inside a seraphic dimension, where hiccups of electricity, hazy steams and piercing frequencies are the set for angelic choirs, even if the slow sonic evaporation as well as the title refers to so-called “angels’ share,” the volatile part of aging alcohol that slowly evaporates through the walls of barrels; the resounding chiming bells on the following Kuppel (2005-06, 14) comes from the bells he recorded in the Markplaz in Karlsruhe (Germany) and the combination of its hypnotical tolls with other two recordings — the noises of urban tramways and the ones coming from a squeaking door close to the studio where he was working at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe — could let you think that Robert managed to grab the breathe of that German city. The interactions of breathe, saxophone and sinister dins, that suddenly explodes in electrical storms which manage to emphasize the sense of tragedy, on the catchy Pluies noires (meaning “Obscure Rains”) got inspired by the theatre play Blasted by Sarah Kane, for which Robert composed the music ina stage direction by Brigitte Haentjens in 2008: such an ominous title refers to the pauses in the play that he rendered by means of the four seasonal stormy “explosions” (spring rain, summer rain, fall rain and winter rain) while having the tragic events that occurred in Bosnia in his own mind, so that he didn’t focus on the typical idea of abstract purification related to rain, but rather to the fact that “all these rains can hardly wash the darkness of the human soul at war.” The most recent piece of this collection, Hamlet-Machine without Actors (2014) is another composition he made for a stage by Brigitte Haentjens of the play Hamletmachine (1979) by Heiner Müller: the track, a shorter version of the original score which lasted one hour and fifteen minutes that got inspired by another work by Normandeau (Hamlet-Machine with Actors, which, as you can easily guess, incorporated the voices and the sounds of the actors of the play!), succeeds in describing the main theme of the play, that is “the oppression of man by the society, the representation of taboos — including sexual ones — through the show and the end of art.” The final Baobabs (2012-13) is mainly base on human voices: even if I’m not a fan of this kind of art, the adaptation of the acousmatic piece Le renard et la rose (1995), consisting of five movements (Babbling and rhythm;Nostalgia and timber;Anger and dynamic;Lassitude and space;Serenity and texture) by Prof Normandeau deserves to be listened.

… the composer acts as a sort of architect who erects sonic cathedrals…

Discreetly you see him sitting in a high folding chair. He doesn’t grumble at his players, he’s already set the scene as he wants it. With encouragement and a little push to the find just the right place. Robert Normandeau directs his acousmatic music very cinematically. And yet he does not make soundtracks.

Normandeau explores fleeting essences, fragmentation and extraction. He investigates timbre at the microscopic level, but also the sonorities of streetcars versus the reverberation of a church. Normandeau even uses rain splatter compositionally. Taking a contemporary classical approach he comes out with dark ambient soundscapes that bump up against Cinema perdu. His Hamlet-Machine without Actors, an adaptation of the soundtrack for the play by Heiner Müller, is certainly reduced to its extreme core. As a lament for the end of the (theatre) art, there remains only an afterglow, like an afterimage; a circle on the inside of your eyelids after looking too long at a light source.

Normandeau puts in just such actors and voices in the forefront the final stretch Baobabs. His interest is particularly in onomatopoeia. This focus allows him to tie language to the concrete world explicitly, a long way from abstract representation. Rhythmic chatter and laughter, dynamic nostalgia and serene texture are choreographed theatrically into a vocal dance that frolics and sparkles.

You shouldn’t listen to Dômes in one go. Choose your work and take the time, as if you’re watching a good movie. And immerse yourself for ten minutes inside one of Normandeau’s spaces. They are like five rooms projecting short films. Little movie theatres like a dioramas you can literally walk through, listening to see the decor and the scene constantly change color and atmosphere.

A fine opus, rich and varied, from Robert Normandeau. Five pieces on this CD. La part des anges is a rather pure acousmatic work, finely distillated. Kuppel, based on concrete sounds, is more exciting at first, but it overstays its welcome. Pluies noires and Hamlet-Machine without Actors are derived from stage music, Normandeau’s forte (and this Hamlet is excellent). Finally, the surprising Baobabs for 4 voices, 6 percussion (Sixtrum) and tape, a powerful, almost animal piece at times, with a dash of Harry Partch.

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On March 22, 2015 on the Dutch radio Concertzender the program Kraak Helder will broadcast the works La part des anges by Robert Normandeau and Catabolisms by Erik Nyström, both recently released on empreintes DIGITALes.…